Tuesday, December 31, 2013

... Lots of love and friendship,
An excellent health,
Success in all your endeavours,
The courage and resources to face the hardships in case you encounter them, and...
The knowledge and wisdom to take the right decisions when faced with difficult choices!

And of course we hope you still haven't gotten bored to death yet, so that we may continue to see ya on these pages! Stay tuned!

MFBB.

PS: sorry ladies if you wanna see hunks dis is not da place - told you before.

"A former member of the (French) High Council for Integration, the sociologist Khalid Hamdani, in an op-ed published by Mediapart in March 2011, wondered how it was possible to continue to accept, without reacting, the ringing of church bells every sundag without anything being done to stop this loud and annoying intrusion of religion into public space."

Hamdani continued: 'attention, this time, French muslims and all republican seculars could form some kind of common front. They could demand the unequivocal application of secularism on the republic's entire territory. They could demand that all religions be treated in the same manner without exceptions or derogatory remakrs. It is of little importance that the roots of France are christian or pagan, or greco-roman.' [quoted in full length]

Khalid Hamdani, muslim scoundrel and an ex-bigshot of the so-called 'High Council for Integration in France'. For monsieur Hamdani, church bells in France should be made to stop IMMEDIATELY.

c.) Khalid Hamdani has defended the integration 'report', in which he asked for stopping the ringing of church bells, on RTL (prime French television chain).

d.) Khalid Hamdani is of moroccan origin. Obviously he has never denounced the calls to prayer of muezzins in his country of origin, a country which has just condemned to 30 months of prison a convert to Christianity.

And Outlaw Mike adds some points of interest:

a.) As always, people should not be fooled by that drab muslim scumbag Khalid Hamdani's call for 'enforcing' strict secular principles with regards to all 'intrusions of religious activity' in public space. Hamdani has never, and WILL NEVER, object to entire Parisian blocks and streets off-limits to infidels on Fridays, when scores of muslims occupy the asphalt for their prayers. He also WILL NEVER object to muezzins' calls for prayer, to be heard loud and clear from more and more mosques in France itself.

b.) the lovely 'Institut du Monde arabe', smack in the centre of Paris, was part of the great state building projects - make that a pet project, actually, of François Mitterrand, of the, uh, French Parti Socialiste.

c.) Mr Jean-Marc Ayrault, France's PM, who was so smitten by Hamdani's report and its recommendations, is a prominent socialist also. I suspect however that you suspected that already.

d.) The management of the IMA in 2008 was the object of a study conducted by a French Senate's Finances Commission led by Adrien Gouteyron, following an accumulated exploitation deficit of 38.5 million EUR. Currently, the Institut du Monde arabe is in 'quasi cessation of payments'. The main reason for the IMA's plunge into an abysmal debt is the fact that the countries of the Arab League, bound by contract to subsidize the IMA to the extent of 40 per cent per year, fail to pay consistently, so that at most 10 per cent is reached. Back in the day, someone should have told the French fonctionnaires and signatories of that contract that muslims are never bound to hold onto their promises when concluded with filty infidels.

Anyway, the net result is that it is the French taxpayer who's filling the deficit gap, to the tune of 12 million euros a year. Votres euros de taxe au travail, chers frogs!

The Institut du Monde arabe, smack in the middle of Paris. Paid for by the French taxpayer, maintained by the French taxpayer, and containing islamic law that explicitly forbids, amongst others, the ringing of church bells. That's for starters, Julie and François. Bonne chance with your approval of zhe ghey mariage!!!

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Upon learning to know the work of Winslow Homer, I could easily understand why he is considered by many the greatest American painter of the nineteenth century. As I am always short on time, I'll try to keep it brief re what you ought to know about this remarkable artist.

50's, meant is of course the 1850's. Started as a commercial printmaker in Boston and NY, briefly studying oil painting in the spring of 1861.

1860's: was sent to the front as an illustrator/correspondent for Harper's Weekly. The second half of the decade, and basically the entire next one, saw Homer developing his art, and were characterized by artistic experimentation and a preference for incorporating nature and especially natural light in his works. Many of his subjects in this period he found at seaside resorts in MA and NJ, although he also frequented the Adirondacks and the White Mountains. It should be noted however that although he began to establish his reputation as a painter in this timeframe, for most of the time in the 60s and 70s he still needed the design of magazine illustrations as a source of income.

After a brief stint in the early eighties in Cullercoats, a village in northern England, where he was impressed by the strenuous lives led by the fishermen and their womenfolk, he settled for good in Prout's Neck, Maine, where he lived and worked until his death, notwithstanding journeys to the Caribbean. His major works from then on would focus on the struggle of Man against the (marine) elements, and, going beyond that, on the naked force of nature, of the Sea, itself.

I chose three works to get you acquainted with Winslow Homer:

Snap the whip.

Three boys in a dory. Flirting with impressionism here.

Eight bells. My personal favorite. In this magnificent shot - can I call it a shot, Winslow? - the painter captures the fight - and mastery - of man vs. Nature, the raw beauty of the wild sea, and the quality of Light illuminating it all. Brilliant!

"Muslim staff working for Marks & Spencer have been given permission to refuse to serve customers buying alcohol or pork products
Its policy decision has highlighted a split among the big food retailers over whether religious staff should be excused certain jobs.

In contrast to M&S, Sainsbury’s said it had issued official guidelines that stated there was no reason why staff who did not drink alcohol or eat pork for religious reasons could not handle the goods.

The advice followed consultations with religious groups, said a spokesman.

Tesco said it treated each case on its merits, but said it “made no sense” to employ staff on a till who refused to touch certain items for religious reasons.

Asda said it would not deploy Muslims on tills who objected to handling alcohol, while Morrisons, which is based in Bradford where there is a large Muslim community, said it had widespread experience of dealing with the issue and would “respect and work around anyone’s wishes not to handle specific products for religious or cultural reasons”.

At M&S, Muslim staff who do not wish to handle alcohol or pork have been told they can politely request that customers choose another till at which to pay.
At one of its stores in central London last week, customers waiting with goods that included pork or alcohol were told by a Muslim checkout worker to wait until another till became available. The assistant was extremely apologetic at having to ask customers to wait.

One customer, who declined to be named, said: “I had one bottle of champagne, and the lady, who was wearing a headscarf, was very apologetic but said she could not serve me. She told me to wait until another member of staff was available.

“I was taken aback. I was a bit surprised. I’ve never come across that before.”

Customers trying to buy alcoholic drinks for Christmas were also asked to wait."

Mail these ASSHOLES at Marks & Spencer and tell them in no uncertain terms that they are a bunch of FUCKING, IGNORANT COWARDS.

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Aussie blokes from Perth, on the west coast. Although they formed in 1998 already, it took them five years to bring out their debut album, Lovers. This single was drawn from it. The nurse has nice legs.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

As per usual at this time of the year, we wish our readers of good will a Merry Christmas!!!

Nativity scene by Jan Gossaert, a Flemish Renaissance painter. Little is known of his exact origins, although there's strong evidence he was actually from Maubeuge, at the presumed time of his birth (1478) in the County of Hainaut, but currently just inside France. What is certain is that he became a member of the Antwerp Painters Guild of Saint Luke in 1503.

Oh, she just so happens to be the Belgian Interior Minister. She got her job in November 2011, following the longest ever government forming period. In the runup to the final distribution of portfolios, this utterly disgusting woman was so unbelievably uncompromising in the Flemish/Walloon negotiations which centered mainly around the BHV issue that the Flemish press bestowed the soubriquet 'Madame Non' upon her.

I might add that she rose to political prominence by using the vehicle of the Walloon Christian Democratic Party, the PSC. Soon after assuming the presidency of that party in 2000 she arranged a congress whereby the name was changed to CDH, making sure that it was well understood that the 'C' would no longer stand for 'Chrétien' (Christian), but for 'centriste' (centrist).

A move that did not surprise me in the least, since from the moment I got to know her, in the late eighties, when she was the poulain of the then PSC president Gerard Deprez, I instinctively knew that she was as much a christian as your average camel is a quantum physicist.

Anyway, Madame Non's facial features are honed by decades of bitching and obstruction vis-à-vis her Flemish counterparts in the plethora of negotiations necessary to keep the Belgium construction afloat.

However, there are times when she shows she IS capable of smiling:

For once, Madame Non is Madame Oui on this photo, where she is flanked by the radical salafist imam Iliass Azaouaj. On the latter's twitter account he boasts proudly of his Al Qaeda membership, and laments he the death of UBL. Around two months ago, a video appeared in which he lauded AQ, adorned with an explosives belt and an assault rifle. He is also known as one of the fellas threatening terror attacks on Belgian soil, this probably following the scrapping of welfare checks for the relatives of 'Belgian' youngsters fighting in Syria. Indeed, it seems Belgium is at the forefront when it comes to provide the 'rebels' in Syria with foot soldiers, and scores of young muslim males have left their homes in Antwerp, Vilvoorde, Ghent and other cities to fight Assad's regime.

Imam Azaouaj's outburst in all likelihood followed the removal of the wife and children of a known Syria fighter from the list of welfare recipients in Antwerp by the Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever, a move which was highly criticized by the greens by the way.

Back to Joelle Milquet. Her defense for posing with this salafist asshole? "The photo was taken during an event where several people asked to pose with her and she did not know who he was". "When I am surrounded by hundreds of people I can't ask all of them to ID themselves".

She doesn’t know what’s going on with the issue and looks like an idiot when addressing it (House Resolution 36).

She ignorantly rudely hilariously laughably states that she is in her district to talk about the Middle East (to be clear Benghazi is very obviously considered part of the Middle East).

Then the crowd is informed by what is presumably an aide of some sort that they are going to “stick to the format” …so no one even gets an actual answer.
Is this who you want making decisions for your country? Remember this in 2014 when she’s up for re-election…

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Have become so strung out over the past month-and-a-half that during the week I simply have been unable to muster the energy and will to come up with even halfway decent posts. And say there's so many good topics out there.

Don't intend to quit however. It's gotta get better.

Janis Ian with At Seventeen.

Her signature song, from the 1975 album Between the Lines.

Train with Drops of Jupiter.

Blokes from San Francisco. This single was drawn from the 2001 album with the same name.

Saturday, December 07, 2013

The Moments, aka (in a later incarnation) Ray, Goodman and Brown, with Girls.

American R&B group. This 1974 hit was actually performed together with The Whatnauts, a soul band from Baltimore, Maryland.

Then it's the turn of Gilbert O'Sullivan with Nothing Rhymed.

Irish singer-songwriter from Waterford, Ireland, who achieved considerable success throughout the seventies. This hit is from 1970.

Today's Saturday Night may seem somewhat cheesy but it's essential Outlaw Mike music nevertheless. This is what I grew up with in the seventies. Mom and dad were no concertgoers and were not up to date with the fads of that age. They were simply working their *sses off day and night to get me and my three siblings a comfy youth. They did have some Gilbert o'Sullivan records however (amongst others). And you know what? It ain't bad at all. Not then and not now, forty years later.

As for The Moments, that hit is so quintessentially mid-70s that I HAD to include it someday.

Both are nice companions. Snapshots of a past age gone forever. Chords, fragments, sounds, moods and impressions, all unbreakably linked and intertwined with memories of an innocent carefree epoch, which will stay with me however till the end of my days. From 1980 onwards the strain would start, slowly at first, then it'd become my own private hell. I'm grateful for what I got before the shit hit the fan.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

My sister and brother-in-law recently visited South Africa, more precisely the Cape Province. They brought back ominous tales.

Apart from the stories about plaasmoorde, they were told by white locals of stringent rules regarding the hiring of people, in that if you're a small business owner looking for an extra hand, the first person you hire MUST be a black. They saw the gated communities for themselves.

And they were told something else, by a formerly Belgian lady of middle age, a native from the region around Ninove (a small town 25 kloms west of Brussels).

This lady is now planning to come back for good - the situation, she said, is becoming too insecure.

The lady said that among blacks there is widespread talk of killing as many whites as possible the day Mandela dies.

Think about that the day the old communist monster dies. Don't cry along with the wolves - There will be enough crying all right. You can be sure all over the West, among our politically correct elites, eaten, no, devoured by white guilt, and brainwashed by decades of false information, there will be the typical handwringing, crocodile tears and 'fitting' eulogies about what a 'great statesman' Nelson Mandela was.

Think instead of the millions of white South Africans who will live in fear of getting killed that day, those who lifted the country up till it was Africa's jewel, those who transformed it into an economic powerhouse of the first order, boasting half of all the railroads on the entire continent. Indeed, thanks to the Afrikaners, blacks enjoyed a far higher standard of living than in virtually every other African country.

Was Apartheid good? It was not, of course. And it should have been abolished. Butin time, when the country was ready for it and sufficient competent black cadres would have been available.

As for the communist scoundrel Mandela, personally I see not a single reason to glorify him. He was a terrorist who was tried for, and convicted of, terrorist activities with the express aim of plunging the country into a bloody civil war. He was the driving force behind the terrorist organization Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC, which in the course of its bloody history was responsible for, amongst others:

a.) the 1983 “Church Street Bombing”, which claimed 19 dead (a good part of them black!) and wounded 217 others.
b.) the bombing of a shopping centre in Amanzimtoti, which killed 5 people (three of them children) and wounded 40.
c.) 'Magoo's Bar Bombing': three dead, 10 wounded
d.) an attack on Johannesburg Court
e.) an attack on a Newcastle Court (24 wounded)
f.) hundreds of other, smaller attacks

Nelson Mandela, the communist killer, served his time on Robbeneiland and in other prisons, and it was well deserved.

The next day at the Palace of Justice in Pretoria, in a segregated courtroom filled on one side with plain-clothed police officers and on the other side with relatives and friends of the accused, prosecutor Percy Yutar called the case of "State versus the National High Command and Others." He then produced an indictment charging the eleven defendants with two counts of sabotage and two counts of conspiracy. The defense, noting that they were just then seeing the indictment for the first time, asked Justice Quartus de Wet for a postponement. De Wet gave the defense three weeks to prepare for trial.

When court reconvened three weeks later, Nelson Mandela led the parade of defendants up a staircase that opened into the center of the court, where a specially constructed dock had been built. Mandela gave the clenched fist salute to supporters that had become an ANC trademark. Mandela shouted, "Amandla!" (Power), and the crowd responded with the cry, "Ngawethu!" (It shall be ours).

Defense attorney Bram Fischer led off the proceedings with an attack on the sufficiency of the indictment. He argued that the charges were vague, and failed to provide any indication as to which defendants carried out which alleged acts of sabotage. Instead, the government's indictment simply stated that details concerning the sabotage were "peculiarly within the knowledge of the accused." Justice de Wet, in his flowing red robes beneath a wooden canopy, found the defense arguments convincing. He told Yutar that the indictment seemed to presuppose guilt and provided almost no clue as to the nature of the offenses. The indictment, Justice de Wet announced, must be quashed. Got off guard, security officials rushed to re-arrest each of the defendants--except one. Yutar salvaged some favorable publicity for the prosecution by announcing that charges would be dropped against Bob Hepple and that he would be the state's first witness.

In December, the remaining defendants were back in court to hear Yutar read the state's new charges. The defendants were accused of sabotage, ordering munitions, recruiting young men for guerrilla warfare, encouraging invasion for foreign military units, and conspiring to obtain funds for revolution from foreign states. The first accused, Nelson Mandela plead not guilty: "My Lord, it it not I, but the government that should be in the dock. I plead not not guilty." Each of the other defendants in turn entered not guilty pleas as well. Yutar delivered the opening statement for the prosecution:
The accused deliberately and maliciously plotted and engineered the commission of acts of violence and destruction throughout the country. The planned purpose thereof was to bring about in the Republic of South Africa chaos, disorder and turmoil, which would be aggravated, according to their plan, by the operation of thousands of trained guerrilla warfare units deployed throughout the country at various vantage points....Their combined operations were planned to lead to confusion, violent insurrection and rebellion, followed, at the appropriate juncture, by an armed invasion of the country by military units of foreign powers. In the midst of the resulting chaos, turmoil and disorder, it was planned by the accused to set up a provisional revolutionary government to take over the administration and control of this country...

Listening to Yutar's address, defense attorneys realized (as Joel Joffe later recounted in his book, The State vs. Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa) that "for most of the accused the only possible verdict was 'guilty.' The case was therefore, as far as we were concerned, a battle to prevent the death penalty from being carried out." The defendants had other goals, however. Many of them saw the trial as the first and last opportunity to explain to the nation why they felt compelled to do what they did for the sake of South Africa's oppressed.

The first prosecution witness would not be, as earlier promised by Yutar, Bob Hepple. Bob Hepple had fled the country. From the safety of Kenya, Hepple told reporters that he never had any intention of testifying against the defendants, whose aims he shared.

Instead, the star witness for the prosecution was Bruno Mtolo (known in court as "Mr. X"), a former Umkhonto we Sizwe saboteur. Mtolo told the court that, on orders from the National High Command, he had blown up a municipal office, a power pylon, and an electricity line. He testified that Mandela had given his Natal region MK comrades a pep-talk about their underground missions. He described the workings of bombs, grenades, land mines, and other weapons used by MK saboteurs. Mtolo also testified that he believed that the ANC and MK had become instruments of the Communist Party. He explained that financial and family reasons led him to abandon Umkhonto we Sizwe:

Mtolo: They kept promising that I would be paid, and they were still making promises long after I had given all hope of ever getting anything from them. They didn’t care about me nor about the others, the recruits who were arrested.
Yutar: Who did not care about them?
Mtolo: The High Command.
Mtolo's betrayal confused Mandela and the other defendants. In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote he was especially upset with Mtolo's willingness to implicate underground activists who were not charged in the case. Mandela considered this "inexcusable."

The other critical piece in the prosecution case was Umkhonto we Sizwe's six-page plan of action, called "Operation Mayibuye," confiscated in the Rivonia raid. The state contended the plan, which called for guerrilla warfare and an invasion of South Africa by supporting foreign military units, had been approved by the ANC executive and was the operating plan of Umkhonto we Sizwe. The defense, on the other hand, contended that Operation Mayibuye was just a draft of a possible plan of action and had not been approved by either MK or the ANC executive. In fact, the defense would argue, many of the defendants (including Nelson Mandela) believed the document to be "entirely unrealistic in its goals and plans."

Yutar produced other damning documents, many of which he read dramatically in court. A document marked "Top Secret," in the handwriting of Goldreich and found at Rivonia, discussed "revolution" and mentioned possible support from people in the USSR, China, Germany, and Yugoslavia, among other countries. Methods of obtaining weapons, including explosives, were outlined in some detail. Documents such as these shocked many trial observers, but the defendants largely viewed their production with indifference--the defendants were ready to admit they talked openly about sabotage and armed struggle.

On the small photo to the right, below, you see the proud author of 'How to be a good communist', flanked by another commie scumbag, Joe Slovo.

Think of what the old monster REALLY stood for when he croaks, and pray for White South Africans that day.

Our media won't tell you, poor little euro, because you have to remain CONVINCED that blacks in the USA, especially young males, are perpetual victims of raaaaaaacist white rethuglicans, but this is what the Knockout Game looks like.

The victim in the video, James Addlespurger, is a teacher from the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA). When I read that, I figured there was a more than fair chance that he was a clueless liberal IDIOT and hallelujah, it turned out he was.

He's Addlespurger's take sometime after the incident:

“Kids today have the power to make the right choices and to constantly try to be better than their former selves. I mean, that’s all we can do in life is to always try to be better than our former selves,” said Addlespurger. “I believe in positivity and having something to live for. For me, it's the music and the literature and the passion of working with people that keeps it alive. If you have nothing to live for, it’s tough. People need a purpose.”

In short if people listen to Addlespurger instead of analyzing the problem and reaching the conclusion that we thank this godforsaken phenomenon on decades of failed liberal policies vis-à-vis the US's black community, the Knockout Games will go on, and people will continue to get hurt and people will die.

Thursday, November 21, 2013

As we are flooded with senseless 'analysis' of the fateful event of Kennedy's death, it is refreshing - but at the same time very, very sobering - to come across Steve McCann's contribution to the articles dealing with JFK's murder 50 years ago. Over at Americanthinker: Three minutes that transformed America:

"Within months of the assassination of John Kennedy, America turned dramatically to the left as the avowed disciples of Franklin Roosevelt and European socialism assumed the reins of power and were the catalyst that unleashed into the American mainstream those true-believers in Marxist ideology determined to transform the nation, and who have now metastasized into a cancer on the American society.

President Lyndon Johnson, in league with an overwhelmingly Democrat-controlled Congress, shamelessly exploited the nation's grief over the death of its youthful President and willfully steered the nation onto the course of massive government intervention into the day-to-day lives of all Americans, and unfettered social spending as personified by a myriad of welfare programs enacted under the rubric of the "War on Poverty", the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, and the unleashing of an avalanche of new regulations. The inexorable transfer of unbridled power to Washington and the political expedient of unsustainable promises to the American people had begun in earnest.

Over the past 50 years the Democratic Party became the unabashed promoters of these policies, while many in the Republican Party, the most notable exception being Ronald Reagan, the enablers. As a result, the American economy is now in a near-permanent state of stagnation and the nation has embarked on a headlong dash into bankruptcy. While the population of the country has increased by 70% since 1963, the national debt has ballooned (on an inflation adjusted basis) 620% over the past half-century from $2,400 Billion to $17,200 Billion; however more ominous is the increase in unfunded liabilities since 1963 from an inflation adjusted $12,700 Billion to $127,000 Billion today. (http://www.usdebtclock.org/)

Although the adjusted Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has increased by 250% during these past 50 years, inflation-adjusted household median income has only grown by 30%, thanks in part to federal, state and local government spending which has increased by 375% and now siphons off 41% of the national GDP as compared to 26% in 1963. The primary factor: entitlement and social spending at all levels of government has increased a phenomenal 767% since 1963 ($450 Billion annually (inflation adjusted) versus $3,900 Billion today) (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com)

Further, as an indicator of the tentacles of a massive central government intruding on the day to day lives of all Americans, the Code of Federal Regulations (the official codification of the general and permanent rules and regulations of the government) is now approaching 180,000 pages (the height of a seven story building), an increase of nearly 500% since 1963. The culmination of this authoritarian trend toward the complete loss of freedom and privacy is the chaos that is ObamaCare and security agencies (such as the NSA) monitoring the daily activities of the citizenry.

However, it is not just the unrestrained growth of government and disastrous fiscal and monetary policies that has brought the country to the precipice it is also the denigration of American society and the transformation of the American ruling class -- a large percentage of whom currently subscribe to socialist political philosophies. This is a ruling class that now has access to trillions of dollars and the unchecked power of government at its disposal. A by-product of which is the astronomical rise in political corruption and cronyism as well an ill-educated and ill-informed citizenry.

This process had its beginning in 1964 through 1968 as the Johnson administrations misguided and grossly mishandled Vietnam War spawned a broad anti-war movement. The ensuing protests unleashed far more than just a demand for an end to the war. Those that blamed America for all manner of alleged sins in the past and determined to transform the United States into a socialist/Marxist nirvana were able to step out from behind the shadows and enter the mainstream of national legitimacy. This swarm of locusts soon enveloped the higher levels of Academia spawning countless clones to further infiltrate and dominate all strata of the education, and media/entertainment establishment as well as assume control of the Democratic Party.

Not only by debasing the curriculum throughout all levels of schooling but through propaganda disseminated by the media/entertainment complex American society was gradually but inexorably altered to reflect the left's determination to upend the basic moral and religious underpinning of society, thus assuring the populace would look to the government as their savior. This process, underway for nearly two generations, has eventuated in the creation of a massive class of low-information and dependent voters unconcerned about the nation's future and susceptible to all manner of lies and propaganda from unscrupulous national leaders.

The most doctrinaire, dangerous and devious occupant of the Oval Office in the nation's history is Barack Obama -- the son of an avowed Marxist father, who not only in his childhood, but during all his formative years, was immersed in radical ideology. He would not be president today were it not for the consequences of the events that took place on the 22nd of November 1963.

It is always hazardous to speculate how someone would have governed had they lived to do so and were re-elected to a second term. However, John Kennedy, by his actions as President revealed himself to be someone who believed in controlling government spending and reducing taxes as a necessary catalyst for economic growth. Further, based on his experience with the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban missile crisis, he was very circumspect about involving the United States in a massive military venture such as Viet Nam. One thing is certain, however, he clearly was not a disciple of Franklin Roosevelt and American socialism despite being a lifelong member of the Democratic Party.

Lee Harvey Oswald, steeped in Marxist ideology from his years in the Soviet Union, was, in his addled thought process, convinced he could change the course of American history by murdering John F. Kennedy. He has succeeded far more than he would have ever imagined. As the American people pause and reflect on those fateful days in November fifty years ago, they must not only remember the man but the consequences of his assassination, as only they can reverse the tide of history."

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Over at National Review, Mark Steyn mercilessly sabers down the disaster that is Obamacare - and its creator:

"... On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko. Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to “pass” a “law” allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The reason for the benign Sovereign’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects — or “folks,” as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference — have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That’s the point. When it doesn’t work, he’ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . .

The most telling line, the one that encapsulates the gulf between the boundless fantasies of the faculty-lounge utopian and the messiness of reality, was this: “What we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Gee, thanks for sharing, genius. Maybe you should have thought of that before you governmentalized one-sixth of the economy. By “we,” the president means “I.” Out here in the ruder provinces of his decrepit realm, we “folks” are well aware of how complicated insurance is. What isn’t complicated in the Sultanate of Sclerosis? But, as with so many other things, Obama always gives the vague impression that routine features of humdrum human existence are entirely alien to him. Marie Antoinette, informed that the peasantry could no longer afford bread, is alleged to have responded, “Let them eat cake.” There is no evidence these words ever passed her lips, but certainly no one ever accused her of saying, “If you like your cake, you can keep your cake,” and then having to walk it back with “What we’re also discovering is that cake is complicated to buy.” That contribution to the annals of monarchical unworldliness had to await the reign of Queen Barry Antoinette, whose powdered wig seems to have slipped over his eyes.

Still, as historian Michael Beschloss pronounced the day after his election, he’s “probably the smartest guy ever to become president.” Naturally, Obama shares this assessment. As he assured us five years ago, “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors.” Well, apart from his signature health-care policy. That’s a mystery to him. “I was not informed directly that the website would not be working,” he told us. The buck stops with something called “the executive branch,” which is apparently nothing to do with him. As evidence that he was entirely out of the loop, he offered this:

- Had I been I informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, “Boy, this is going to be great.” You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, “This is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity,” a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work. -

Ooooo-kay. So, if I follow correctly, the smartest president ever is not smart enough to ensure that his website works; he’s not smart enough to inquire of others as to whether his website works; he’s not smart enough to check that his website works before he goes out and tells people what a great website experience they’re in for. But he is smart enough to know that he’s not stupid enough to go around bragging about how well it works if he’d already been informed that it doesn’t work. So he’s smart enough to know that if he’d known what he didn’t know he’d know enough not to let it be known that he knew nothing. The country’s in the very best of hands.

Michael Beschloss is right: This is what it means to be smart in a neo-monarchical America. Obama spake, and it shall be so. And, if it turns out not to be so, why pick on him? He talks a good Royal Proclamation; why get hung up on details?

Until October 1, Obama had never done anything — not run a gas station, or a doughnut stand — other than let himself be wafted onward and upward to the next do-nothing gig. Even in his first term, he didn’t really do: Starting with the 2009 trillion-dollar stimulus, he ran a money-no-object government that was all money and no objects; he spent and spent, and left no trace. Some things he massively expanded (food stamps, Social Security disability) and other things he massively diminished (effective foreign policy), but all were, so to speak, preexisting conditions. Obamacare is the first thing Obama has actually done, and, if you’re the person it’s being done to, it’s not pretty..."

Readers of this blog will know that I am against what in the Low Countries is officially known as 'Ontwikkelingssamenwerking' - 'Development Aid', on the grounds that this so-called aid is actually counterproductive. This has been demonstrated time and again - sometimes very eloquently from unsuspected corners by authors like Dambisa Moyo - but for our leftist moral betters feeling good about yourself by taking money away from others and throwing it away in useless projects (filling dicator's coffers in the process) is so much more important than allowing the Invisible Hand of Capitalism to efficiently generate prosperity in third world countries.

I am of course NOT against emergency aid, which is why I urge our readers to contribute money to helping alleviate the plight of so many Filipinos following the passage of the devastating typhoon Haiyan there.

I advise Belgian readers to donate to the Red Cross Flanders, or its counterpart in Wallonia, since donating to the ubiquitously propagated 21-21 HAIYAN initiative is giving money to the same people who in 2004 REFUSEDa gift of 12,500 EUR of Vlaams Belang for the tsunami-stricken regions in South East Asia. The reason? Because Vlaams Belang is a rightwing party and the orchestrators of the 12-12 campaign were, and are, hardcore leftists. Yes, you read that right. They preferred missing funds to help tsunami victims because the money came from the Right.

So, again, in my opinion it is preferable to donate to the Red Cross. Doctors Without Borders is also a good choice.

The Red Cross account is BE53 0000 0000 5353. Be sure to mention ‘Hulp in Filipijnen’.

Saturday, November 09, 2013

Lenny Kravitz opens with Fly Away, a single drawn from his 1998 album 5.

He was named after his uncle, Leonard Kravitz, a Korean War hero who saved most of his platoon from the Chinese wiping it out but who was himself killed in the action. It earned him a DSC posthumously.

I'm very much okay with Lenny. Terrific music, no arrogant brainless fuckface like so many music celebs today, not shy to call himself a Christian.

Friday, November 08, 2013

"So now it turns out Obama knew that 93 million Americans would have their health insurance canceled the whole time he was claiming, "If you like your insurance, you can keep it. Period."

Obama lied. Period. "Hope and Change" was actually "A Sucker Is Born Every Minute."

Even without the 2010 Health and Human Services (HHS) report admitting that 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance, anyone with half a brain (which is a pre-existing condition) knew that millions of Americans would be thrown off their insurance plans under Obamacare. Under the law, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is to determine what every health insurance plan must cover -- and any plans that don't are illegal.

As a result, gay guys are now going to be forced to buy plans that cover maternity care. Mormons will have to buy plans that cover gambling addiction therapy. Elderly couples can buy only insurance that includes pediatric dental care. Catholic hospitals will be required to provide birth control and abortions.

Our federal overseers, led by the arrogant and smug gender-feminist Sebelius, know what's best for us. (Which is so nice of her since, as she recently pointed out, she doesn't work for us.) Her idea of flexibility is not requiring Catholic priests to perform abortions. Not yet, anyway.

Obviously, health insurance premiums are going through the roof with all these federal mandates. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute reports that health insurance premiums will be higher than before Obamacare in at least 45 states -- an astronomical 256 percent higher in some cases. The Los Angeles Times says middle-income families in California will pay 30 percent more for health insurance, even with the subsidies.

Policies are being canceled because your old plan -- the one you shopped for and liked -- is now illegal. It doesn't cover Sandra Fluke's dental dams. Obama is blaming the insurance companies for discontinuing policies that he made illegal. (At least he isn't blaming the cancellations on a guy who put a movie trailer on the Internet this time.)

Isn't it your basic duty as a caring human being to buy an expensive health care plan you don't really want? Because who knows better about the health care needs of 310 million Americans than a smug gender-feminist? Certainly not you."

"The best we can hope for is that influence-peddlers and government bureaucrats make wise decisions about our health care, just as they did with Solyndra, Social Security, public education and the Amtrak food service. Oops! (Only the government could lose billions of dollars with a monopoly.) From the people who brought you the Postal Service ... here's Obamacare!

It's the homework requirement that is the most annoying aspect of Obamacare. Sure, millions of Americans will lose their health insurance and be forced to buy plans they don't want. And many, many millions will no longer be able to go to the doctor of their choosing -- or any doctor at all!

But we've also all been given homework -- mountains of reports, exchanges, insurance plans and mail to study. I'd prefer a 50 percent tax hike to this forced busy-work under Obamacare.

What if Americans don't want to spend weeks online figuring out their new insurance options? What if we don't want to provide the government with reams of personal information simply to be able to buy health insurance? What if we just want to pay our doctor directly for a yearly checkup? Why do we have to examine HHS regulations to find out how much that's going to cost us in fines and taxes?

Under Obamacare, every day is tax day.

And for what? Eighty-five percent of Americans were happy with their health care before Obamacare, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index -- higher than almost any other product or service polled, with even Amazon coming in at 88 percent satisfaction. Even uninsured Americans were as satisfied with their health care as Canadians were with their national health care.

Kausfiles assured us there would be no death panels or benefits cuts under Obamacare because the voters would rise up and punish politicians if they dared cut our benefits!

What about those of us who don't want to be in a constant state of agitation just to get the health care of our choice? Not everyone is better off in a world where the pushy win and the quiet and unassuming die because their rare diseases didn't attract a band of noisy lobbyists.

No group of government bureaucrats can substitute for hundreds of millions of Americans making individual choices about their own lives and their own health. It would be as if the government took it upon itself to tell us whom to marry. Only someone who went to Harvard would think central planners should do that.

The smart people in the Soviet Union tried to plan the nation's agriculture, and the result was 50 years of "bad weather." And they were dealing with inert objects -- land, seeds and crops.

They didn't have to consider whether the fertilizer was a teetotaler who didn't anticipate needing substance abuse therapy or a priest who preferred to skimp on marital counseling insurance.

Our central planners think they can direct something infinitely more complex than farmland: human beings and their individual health needs. Under Obamacare, the pushy and the connected win. Everyone else loses."

And if you don't like Ann Coulter, maybe you're more sympathetic to me, and it that cas you might want to listen to a few observations of mine:

The bipartisan CBO (Congressional Budget Office) predicts that even under Obamacare, the number of uninsured will never fall below 30 million. Check it out here. Now call me a callous monster, but in which respect does 30 million uninsured differ that much, relatively speaking with a pop. of 310 million, from the estimated CURRENT 49 million? And to what degree is the latter number really a reflection of the despised 'heartlessness' of the 'American system'? You will always have uninsured. How many of those 49 million uninsured are really incapable of buying a plan, and how many can, but simply haven't thought of doing so yet? Christ, ten years agoI myself DID NOT HAVE health care coverage!!! Because I was young and healthy and thought that it was something for when I got a little further on the slippery path to old geezerdom.

No honestly, right now almost 90 per cent of the about 255-260 million people with an insurance, or covered by it, are hunky dory with their insurance. That's about 230 million people.

Under Obamacare, not only will you STILL have about, say, two-thirds of the number of uninsured right now, PLUS the majority of those with an O-Care insurance not happy with it. 'What difference does it make'?

Long before Obamacare, the country that spent the most on healthcare, in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, WAS the US already. Take a look at this list e.g.:

According to OECD numbers, the US spent a whopping 8,233 US$ per capita in 2010, for a total of 17.6 per cent of GDP. That's breathtaking, especially when you compare it with, uh, my own Belgistan: 3,969 US$ which translates into 10.5 per cent of GDP.

And yet I'm VERRRY much pleased with our healthcare system, I'm living proof of it.

In other words, it's not a matter of not spending enough, as demonrats and international leftards want the whole world to believe (as a child I was spoonfed the notion that if in the US you fall seriously ill and you can't pay for a cure you are left to die in the gutter) as it is of getting more bang for the buck.

In my opinion, policymakers in the US, and by that I mean not only demonratic policymakers, should actually have taken a close look to how it is done here instead of coming up with an unworkable moloch that will make things only WORSE...

We don't have a scam like the UK's NHS. Our doctors and nurses are not state employees. Most of them work in hospitals and clinics that are VZW's - Verenigingen Zonder Winstoogmerk - or tax exempt entities. Sure, they do receive state funds to make ends meet but by and large the State, until now thank God, does not meddle in how our medical institutions organize their work. There's also state of the art private clinics thanks to the principle of competition. And somehow, somehow, our insurance premiums are fair. I pay around 720 EUR yearly for a plan that covers our family of four. How that is possible when premiums in the States are reportedly so much higher I don't know. Perhaps the staggering costs of litigation for alleged medical wrongdoing has something to do with it.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, looking closely at successful health care systems and modelling the US system after that would have been FAR MORE effective than coming up with a costly monstrosity that in the end will make things WORSE for basically everyone.

Wednesday, November 06, 2013

"I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world." — David Cameron, Prime Minister, Great Britain.

But critics say that British ambitions to attract investments from Muslim countries, companies and individuals are spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel financial system based on Islamic Sharia law. The Treasury also said some sukuk Islamic bond issues may require the government to restrict its dealings with Israeli-owned companies in order to attract Muslim money.

The London Stock Exchange will be launching a new Islamic bond index in an effort to establish the City of London as one of the world's leading centers of Islamic finance.

Britain also plans to become the first non-Muslim country to issue sovereign Islamic bonds, known as sukuk, beginning as early as 2014.

The plans are all part of the British government's strategy to acquire as big a slice as possible of the fast-growing global market of Islamic finance, which operates according to Islamic Sharia law and is growing 50% faster than the conventional banking sector.

Although it is still a fraction of the global investment market -- Sharia-compliant assets are estimated to make up only around 1% of the world's financial assets -- Islamic finance is expected to be worth £1.3 trillion (€1.5 trillion; $2 trillion) by 2014, a 150% increase from its value in 2006, according to the World Islamic Banking Competitiveness Report 2012-2013, published in May 2013 by the consultancy Ernst & Young.

But critics say that Britain's ambitions to attract investments from Muslim countries, companies and individuals are spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel global financial system based on Islamic Sharia law.

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced the plans during a keynote speech at the ninth World Islamic Economic Forum, which was held in London from October 29-31, the first time the event has ever been held outside the Muslim world.

"Already London is the biggest center for Islamic finance outside the Islamic world," Cameron told the audience of more than 1,800 international political and business leaders from over 115 countries.

"And today our ambition is to go further still. Because I don't just want London to be a great capital of Islamic finance in the Western world, I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world."

David Cameron, this blunt IDIOT and sorry excuse for a PM, obviously is incapable of acknowledging that the muslim world is underperforming dramatically economically. Muslim financing methods are sluggish and totally inefficient. By contrast, western financing methods are the unquestionable engine behind the world's economic growth, as they have been copied by basically all other (non-muslim) countries, even China. Genuine drawbacks like crashes in the stock market are in se not unavoidable, as they are often the result of government intervention (read harmful legislation) and when not, their effects are relatively well digested IF, again, government(s) do not interfere.

By contrast, what have islamic financing methods ever produced apart from high-profile infrastructure projects that are basically the result of oil wealth? The following exerpt offers a sobering diagnosis of islam's inability to foster sound economic systems:

"The evidence of dismal economic condition in Muslim world, compared to the other regions of the globe, is obviously staggering. Even a scant examination of the key economic indicators in prominent Muslim countries reveals abysmal results. I put together a table showing the values of a few such indicators for 17 prominent Muslim countries and carefully examined and compared and contrasted them with those for the industrialized nations. These 17 countries all have a population of more than ten millions, at least 88% of which is Muslim. The findings may be appalling but not totally new or surprising. With the exception of Turkey and a couple of oil-rich counties, namely Iran and Saudi Arabia, almost all the other Muslim countries I looked into have a per capita income level of less than $5,000, in most cases even less than $2,000. To put this in perspective, the per capita income for United States is around $47,000, which is currently ranked number seven in the world. The share of population living below poverty line (defined as the annual income of nearly $20,000 for a family of four according to the US Census Bureau) is another telling statistics. This rate in key Muslim countries ranges from 12% in Syria to as high as 63% in Niger, 53% in Afghanistan, and 45% for both Yemen and Bangladesh. This rate is about 18% for Iran.

One can surmise that the percentage of population living below poverty line should be very low for a rich country like the US or really high for the poor nations. Well, it is not necessarily so. This rate, for example, is currently about 13% for the US simply because income distribution is fairly inequitable in this country and the rich and poor gap has been widening during the last three decades. On the contrary, for a poor country with low per capita income, like Syria, the same rate is relatively low, 12%. This is either due to reasonably even distribution of income or because of statistical inaccuracies.

Often, economists use the combined rates of unemployment and inflation for specific year, known as the misery index, to gauge the extent of economic well being for a country or for international comparison. The lower is this index, the better is economic condition. Rising index, on the other hand, signifies economic stagnation. The misery index of more than 10% is considered unacceptable for the United States. For the past 15 years, the misery index has been around 9% for the U. S. economy in average despite the gloomy economic condition in recent years, thanks to very low rate of inflation. The misery index for the major Muslim countries ranges from 57% for Afghanistan, 58% for Iraq, 46% for Yemen, and 17% for morocco. This rate stands at 27% for Iran. One must also be mindful that all economic statistics in these are published exclusively by government and are subject to manipulation and window dressing.

Lagging behind industrialized nations in production of manufactured products and services, many Muslim countries mainly rely on export of oil, raw materials, and basic agricultural products as the primary source of revenues. The total value of exports of the selected Muslim countries is nearly $708 billion a year including the vast amount of money from oil exports. This number is about 50% of the value of the China’s total exports, and is less than the total value of annual exports by Japan. There is evidently no feasible way to calculate the value of the non-oil exports for all the oil-exporting Muslim countries in my sample because they do not publish any relevant reliable data. However, according to a research conducted by some Arab scholars, the total value of non-oil exports by the entire Arab countries is less than the value of exports by the tiny country of Finland!"

But if you though that Britain's flirt with economic disaster was "all", forget about it. It goes further than that:

"In 2012, the British government began offering Muslim workers a Sharia-compliant pension fund in the public sector. A new government agency, the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST), will give Muslims who do not already have a company pension the option of investing in the HSBC Life Amanah Pension Fund, a Sharia-compliant pension scheme. The initial target market comprises some 200,000 Muslims in Britain.

In June 2011, Pointon York, an independent financial services company based in Leicestershire in central England, announced that it will begin offering four Sharia-compliant Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPP) products that comply with Islamic law.

Pointon York was the first specialist SIPP provider to receive Sharia-compliant accreditation by the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB), which has pioneered Islamic retail banking in the United Kingdom. The IBB will supervise the entire life-cycle of Pointon York's pension funds to ensure full compliance with Sharia legal principles.

Muslim families in Britain can already acquire Sharia-compliant baby bonds under the British government's Child Trust Fund scheme. In 2008, Britain's Financial Services Authority (FSA) authorized the establishment of the country's first Islamic insurance company as well as the country's first Sharia MasterCard, called the Cordoba Gold MasterCard.

In addition, takaful, a type of Islamic insurance, reached a new high in 2012, with premiums estimated to have reached around $30 billion, according to The City UK, the financial services lobby group.

PM Cameron told the economic forum that Britain has also taken steps to ensure that Muslims are not discriminated against by implementing measures ending "double taxation" on Islamic mortgages and introducing alternative forms of student and start-up loans to comply with a ban on interest payments. "Never again should a Muslim in Britain feel unable to go to university because they cannot get a student loan simply because of their religion," he said.

But some are saying that Britain should go even farther in aligning its financial system with Sharia law. In an interview with the newspaper London24, Jodie Ginsberg of Demos Finance, a financial services research firm, said: "David Cameron is right to throw Britain's doors open to the Muslim world to showcase our trading wares. But we should also use this forum as an opportunity to consider how the principles of Islamic finance itself, not just the money generated in the Muslim world, might be applied in the UK. Islamic finance is one of the few models successfully to have weathered the 2008 credit crunch and its aftermath."

Monday, November 04, 2013

I'm fucked up and can't bring myself to write an original post for the moment, I'm simply lacking the gusto. The company is consuming all my energy. It's not that there aren't sufficient topics, quite the contrary. In Belgium, the disastrous handling of the economy by our very left of center government (and I mean disastrous). The (predictable) trainwreck that's Obamacare. Cameron hellbent on making London the foremost center of sharia compliant banking in the West. The very sad infighting among rightwingers, be it Steyn vs some lesser gods (not that I blame Steyn, it's the others who started it), or between GOP factions. There's a plethora of topics. But sorry, can't. Can't.

Watch this video instead. Colin Flaherty and the trailer of White Girl Bleed A Lot.

More and more I'm beginning to understand why Pam Geller refers to the MSM as the Enemydia.

Saturday, November 02, 2013

It must have been the autumn of 1982 when my pal John D. S. introduced me to a peculiar rock artist by means of showing me an LP cover with a banana on it, and exposing me to some songs on cassette. That album, it turned out, was the debut album of an alternative rock band, the Velvet Underground, with vocal assistance on it by the then as now obscure German singer Nico (that's a she, btw). The two main characters in VU were, so I learned from my friend, John Cale... and a fella by the name Lou Reed. I HAD to know them to be cool.

And right he was. Back in those days, I was a rock illiterate, having to rely on mainstream radio to reconnoitre the musical landscape of the day. Needless to say, if that's your only source of information you'll indeed stay pretty much a novice re the real stuff. Occasionally some good music would come my way, like The Police's De do do do de da da da (from the 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta), or The Clash's Rock the Casbah. Heck, I'd rate even The Buggles' Video killed the radio star as acceptable. But most of the time it was crap like Bucks Fizz with Making your Mind Up, Super Trooper by ABBA and stuff like that.

In that faraway autumn John all of a sudden changed that, and before long I was acquainted with Rush (Moving Pictures!), Steve Winwood, The Kinks, Uriah Heep, VU and... Lou Reed. Amongst others.

Anyway, here's a triplet of quintessential Lou Reed songs. No, I won't include Walk on the Wild Side, which I do consider his signature song btw. It's just that I figure you'll come across that one on more than enough eulogies. Caroline Says is good, but not accessible enough for this occasion - plus I'm not in the mood for it. Sweet Jane sounds a bit inappropriate for the moment. So here's Real good time together instead.

From Street Hassle (1978).

Satellite of Love comes second:

From another iconic album, Transformer (1972).

And to top it off, what better song than Perfect Day?

The very first Lou Reed song I got to know. From the same album.

Thanks Lou. As I grow older, you learn to acknowledge and appreciate the influences in life that shape, inform, and amuse you. You were one of those man. Thanks again, and RIP.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

Fast forward almost twenty-five years 2008, when the ethnic Norwegians of Madcon had a huge hit with Beggin'.

Actually a cover of the 1967 The Four Seasons' song.

Las, if you read this, thx for dropping by. Hey, I've never been 'back up again' since I've never been away. It's just that people don't want to listen to me so I've got to keep hammering it in their heads. I'm sorry, but I can't honor your request since i can't decide which background color would be better. Is black really that bad? I got no trouble reading white characters on black.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Mark Steyn is his usual self, while our media are pretending he does not exist.

"The "war" part of the war on terror is pretty much over, and we're now fighting it culturally, rhetorically. Which is not something we do well. Take the British prime minister and his traditional nothing-to-do-with-Islam statement, issued in the wake of the Kenyan shopping-mall carnage:

These appalling terrorist attacks that take place where the perpetrators claim they do it in the name of a religion: They don't. They do it in the name of terror, violence and extremism and their warped view of the world. They don't represent Islam, or Muslims in Britain or anywhere else in the world.

Same with the Muslims who beheaded a British soldier, Drummer Rigby, on a London street in broad daylight. On that occasion, David Cameron assured us that the unfortunate incident was "a betrayal of Islam. . . . There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act."

How does he know? Mr. Cameron is not (yet) a practicing Muslim. A self-described "vaguely practicing" Anglican, he becomes rather less vague and unusually forceful and emphatic when the subject turns to Islam. At the Westgate mall in Nairobi, the terrorists separated non-Muslim hostages from Muslims and permitted the latter to leave if they could recite a Muslim prayer—a test I doubt Mr. Cameron could have passed, for all his claims to authority on what is and isn't Islamic. So the perpetrators seem to think it's something to do with Islam—and, indeed, something to do with Muslims in the United Kingdom, given that the terrorists included British subjects (as well as U.S. citizens).

It was a busy weekend for Nothing to Do with Islam. Among the other events that were nothing to do with Islam were the murder of over 85 Pakistani Christians at All Saints' Church in Peshawar and the beheading of Ricardo Dionio in the Philippines by BIFF, the aggressively acronymic breakaway faction (the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters) from the more amusingly acronymic MILF (the Moro Islamic Liberation Front). Despite a body count higher than Kenya, the Pakistani slaughter received barely a mention in the Western media. You'd be hard put to find an Anglican church in England with a big enough congregation on a Sunday morning to kill 85 worshipers therein, but in Peshawar, a 99 percent Muslim city, the few remaining Christians are not of the "vaguely practicing" Cameron variety. Viewed from London, however, they've already lost: One day there will be no Christians in Peshawar and the city will be 100 percent Muslim. It may be "nothing to do with Islam," but it's just the way it is: We accept the confessional cleansing of Pakistan, as we do of Egypt, because it's part of "the Muslim world." Nairobi, on the other hand, is not, and a murderous assault on an upscale shopping mall patronized by Kenya's elite and wealthy secular expats gets far closer to the comfort zone wherein David Cameron "vaguely practices": In a "clash of civilizations" in which one side doesn't want to play, a shattered church has less symbolic resonance than a shattered frozen-yogurt eatery.

On this side of the Atlantic, meanwhile, the Canadian branch of the Islamic Society of North America lost its charitable status after it was revealed to be funding all that jihad stuff that's nothing to do with Islam. This presented a small problem for Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal party, son of Pierre, and on course to be the Queen's dimmest prime minister of her six-decade reign: Where David Cameron is a silky, slippery deceiver who surely knows better, young Justin seems genuinely to believe the mush he serves up. Asked to explain his recent photo-op at the now-discredited ISNA, he replied: "Part of my job is to speak with as many Canadians as possible and talk to people about the kinds of shared values we have."

I don't suppose M. Trudeau really means he "shares values" with terrorism supporters, but he does get to the heart of the problem: To put it at its mildest, there seem to be insufficient "shared values" between Western societies and a not-insignificant number of young Muslim men who are nominally and legally citizens thereof. One survivor of the Westgate mall said, "I don't understand why you would shoot a five-year-old child." But what's to understand? The child was shot because he was not Muslim. Five-year-olds died at All Saints' Church for the same reason—because, even in a town that's 99 percent Muslim, a non-Muslim kindergartner is a provocation. Crazy, huh? Yet it is not inconceivable that the man who executed the five-year-old at the Westgate mall was one of those "British subjects" or "U.S. citizens." That's to say, he's not some primitive from the fringes of the map but someone who has grown up in the same society as Justin Trudeau and decided that Justin's "shared values" are worthless.

To be charitable to Mr. Cameron, he is trying to point out that very few Muslims want to stare a five-year-old in the eye and pull the trigger. But, likewise, very few of them want to do anything serious—in their mosques and madrassahs—about the culture that incubates such men. The prime minister is betting that all the clever chaps like him can keep the lid on and hold things to what, at the height of the Northern Irish "Troubles," cynical British officials privately called "an acceptable level of violence." A combined weekend corpse count of 150 is, apparently, "acceptable"—or at any rate not sufficiently unacceptable to prompt any reconsideration of a British, Canadian, and European immigration policy that makes Islam the principal source of Western population growth.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

An immensely beautiful song by a great black diva. Where are they these days? Why do we have to make do with Rihanna?

We should also not forget the geniuses who composed and wrote this song, actually one of many they did for Dionne Warwick. These geniuses were Burt Bacharach for the music and Hal David for lyrics. I assume both names don't ring a bell whatsoever with most persons born after 1980. Bacharach and David are the men behind gems performed by Herb Alpert, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack and The Carpenters - amongst others. The photo shows Bacharach in his prime, with his second wife, the actress Angie Dickinson (as a sidenote, I might add that she was a mighty hot ticket, but I think you can figure that out for yourself).

Anyone who had a heart was Warwick's first top ten hit in the States, Canada, Spain, The Netherlands, South Africa, Belgium and Australia in January 1964. Since it was written in 1963, that makes it's right now half a century old. And maybe it's just me (though I don't really believe that), but 50 years later it's still hasn't lost one bit of its attractiveness. I guess that's pretty amazing. We're talking here about a hit written in the era Kennedy was murdered - seems an awfully long time ago, huh? Think of Scott Joplin's famous ragtime hit, The Entertainer, written in 1902. Let's be honest, ragtime sounds hopelessly archaic in a way classical pieces written even two centuries earlier don't. We recognize it's importance, but even in the sixties, half a century ago, it must already have sounded terribly uncool and old-fashioned. Almost as many years separate 2013 from 1963, when Anyone... was written, as 1963 from 1902. But to me it's like Warwick's hit is still as fresh, moving and... actual, as back then. It's a testimony to the extremely lucky hit of Bacharach and David meeting.

Friday, October 18, 2013

On October 11, police officers wanted to arrest a 19-year old criminal suspect of moroccan or turkish origin in the Meulenberg neighborhood in Houthalen-Helchteren, northeast Belgium. They entered the dwelling where the suspect lived, but family and sympathizers ran amok and caused such turmoil that the suspect, already in handcuffs, was able to escape.

In a flying pig moment, the socialist mayor Alain Yzermans, deemed the deliberate obstruction of the neighborhood in the arrest of a criminal suspect strong enough to set in motion a so-called Police Intervention Plan, which authorised the deployment of no less than 80 (eighty) police officers.This relatively massive show of force was met with widespread rioting in the neighborhood, in the course of which several police officers were wounded, one of them suffering a fractured skull.

One of the rioters filmed the events and put it on YouTube. At first everything seems quiet, but from the 5'30'' mark things get interesting. The police vehicles leave the neighborhood and are pelted with stones by the muslim scum. One of the drivers, an officer from nearby Lummen, was hit by a stone at the head and crashed first against a streetlight, then against a house, in the process suffering a cracked skull.

All this accompanied by the jubilant cheers of the followers of the prophet of course.

Here are some blurred but atmospheric stills from the incident:

After the riots, Police Corps Chief Jean-Paul Lucas stated in a press conference that after the police van had crashed and the driver, with a life-threatening skull injury, lay wedged against the steering wheel, the young (turks) tried to get hold of his service gun.

There's several more 'interesting' angles about this story, not least the mind-boggling reaction of Flemish Interior Minister Geert Bourgeois (NVA) to a series of questions posed by Filip Dewinter (Vlaams Belang) in (Flemish) parliament regarding the riots. Bourgeois said - I kid you not - that urban planning in the Meulenberg neighborhood should be studied, since it may have played a role in the 'obvious' segregation there.

Golly, yeah! IF ONLY traffic lights, preferably red all the time, had been installed at the intersection of Bremstraat and Kerklaan instead of a roundabout!!! IF ONLY Wildrozenlaan had been triangular in shape and not like an arc, and IF ONLY Acaciastraat and Gagelstraat had been intersecting at forty-five degrees instead of thirty, THEN there might have been not riots according to Bourgeois!!!

As has been demonstrated time and again, muslim immigrants don't give a rat's ass whether there are criminals among them. On these pages I have several times remarked that when we westerners hear about one of 'our' criminals being arrested, or shot down or whatever, our reaction is invariably 'good riddance'. Not so muslims. They close ranks and clearly consider the perpetrator as one of their own, and when police intervene, as a hero even. It's a simple truth that completely eludes our poltically correct moral betters.

Another simple truth for which we have to thank them is that you can be DAMN SURE that most turkish households in neighborhoods like Meulenberg possess illegal firearms - despite Belgium's stringent anti-gun laws, closely observed by the meek autochton population. If ever things get REALLY HOT, and THEY WILL at some point in the future, we native Belgians will be as defenseless as the sheep the followers of the prophet now slaughter so eagerly - often illegally by the way - in this period of ramadan.

Thursday, October 03, 2013

Well, it's Anke Vandermeersch, a leading lady of the Vlaams Belang and a Senator for our party since 2003. She's a former Miss Belgium, though one with brains, as she's a lawyer and specialist in international fiscal judicial matters by formation. Like her male counterpart in the VB, Filip Dewinter, she's always in the frontlines when it comes to highlight the frightening islamization of our country. Since she's a woman, her campaigns often focus on the dreadful future that awaits her sex once islam will have made irreversible inroads into our once free society. She is also a co-founder of the organization Vrouwen Tegen Islamisering - VTI (Women Against Islamization), and in the past VTI made some headlines already with a couple of remarkable campaigns - more on that later.

The ad above is from VTI's website, and this is the latest campaign Mrs. Vandermeersch lent her support to. The campaign, under the slogan Vrijheid of Islam [Freedom or Islam - MFBB] laments the ever growing number of incidents whereby women in Antwerp are insulted by muslims when venturing out on the streets in attire the followers of the prophet deem unchaste. On the close-up above you see a couple of legs - yes, they are Mrs. Vandermeersch's legs - with the scale muslims in Antwerp - and throughout the world, no doubt - use when classifying women. The soles of the shoes are 'Sharia compliant' - read, it's how muslim males view a woman's place in society. Just under the ankles you can read 'Gematigde islam' - 'moderate islam'. Showing an ankle is a provocation. A woman who bares her calves is a slut. If her skirt reveals her knees she's a whore. A couple of inches higher up? Justifies rape. And if she's wearing a bikini, well, showing that much bare flesh is sufficient reason to stone her.

Said Anke Vandermeersch at the launch of the campaign: "In islam a woman is considered inferior. THE symbol par excellence is obliging her to wear certain clothing. 'Whore' and 'slut' are terms we get called when we are walking the streets in Antwerp. We object to that'. 'We', means 'Vrouwen tegen islamisering' [VTI, Women against islamization - MFBB].

Barely had Senator Vandermeersch gotten her campaign underway however, when French shoedesigner Christian Louboutin, the manufacturer of the high pumps Mrs. Vandermeersch is wearing in the photograph, threatened to sue her and VTI for... damaging the image of Louboutin shoes.

This is a screenshot of the Het Laatste Nieuws article dealing with the subject. The caption reads 'Shoe manufacturer Louboutin wants to forbid VB-campaign.'

The photo below shows Louboutin with Blake Lively wearing one of his 'creations'.

Once again, upon reading this story, I had a déjà vu. This is definitely not the first time VB campaigns are being stalled in their tracks for the sole reason that anything having to do with the VB is suspect - courtesy a decadelong barrage of outright lies and defamation by the regime media in Belgium. The dreadful result is that people who should know better immediately react hysterically when their organization, products, ideas or whatever are somehow linked to the Vlaams Belang - and this despite the fact that basically the VB has since a long time become a totally respectable political movement, generating many sensible law proposals. Ironically, quite a few of these have over the years been silently signed into law by the politically correct parties, although the phrase 'give credit where credit is due' has not reached our shores yet. The Vlaams Belang is still treated like a political pariah in Belgium; voter fatigue, its insistence on the unattainable goal of Flemish Independence, and the emergence of a sexier 'VB-lite' party, the NVA, has gnawed seriously at its strenght. However, the VB is still the only party of some weight to seriously make a stand against the creeping islamization of our country. Mr Louboutin, who is openly gay, should acknowledge this. If ever islam gets to rule in the west - God forbid - then dark days will have arrived for him and his partner Louis Benech, a landscape architect.

But no; he prefers to howl with the wolves in the forest. From east to west, in our insane world, anything that's genuinely Conservative in the Western sense, read Burkean Conservative, is treated with sheer and utter contempt and outright hostility as if the ideas and ideals of said movement are somehow inhuman and not worthy of serious dialogue. The likes of Mr Louboutin would never object to a 21st century version of Imelda Marcos wearing his creations, and Dennis Rodman has no qualms of visiting a murderous gnome like Kim-Jong-Un, but a female politican of the Vlaams Belang on Louboutin pumps? The horror!

As if Louboutin's insistence on Vandermeersch and her movement stopping their campaign and destroying the photographic material was not enough, barely one day later our newspapers gleefully ran the story of yet another one threatening with a lawsuit against the VB Senator:

A Canadian student in graphic design at a Vancouver university, Rosea Lake, got wind of VTI's campaign, found it sufficiently resembling her own 'work' 'Judgements' and was reportedly so aghast at the alleged plagiarism that she threatened to sue Vandermeersch if she did not stop the 'Vrijheid of Islam' right away. Het Laatste Nieuws reported that Lake would fly over from Canada this very week to confront Van dermeersch in court.

Here is a comparison of the two photos:

And here is Rosea Lake. Why am I not surprised at her androgynous look?

Prudish. Flirty. Whore. Proper. Cheeky. Slut. These are just a few of the words that could be used to describe a woman's sexual behavior based on her appearance alone, and 18-year-old college freshman Rosea Lake chose to display them starkly -- on a young woman's legs in a photo that has since gone viral. (Scroll down to see the image.)

Lake, who studies graphic design and illustration at Capilano University in Vancouver, never thought she'd become an Internet sensation when she posted her "Judgments" photo project to her Tumblr on January 5th. But something about the picture struck a chord with those who saw it, and within 24 hours the image had been re-blogged 100,000 times.

The photo, which the student took as part of an AP high school art class last year, depicts the back of her friend Ali MacKenzie's legs, Lake told The Huffington Post. Horizontal lines are drawn up her leg, reflecting various skirt lengths, and next to each line is a description. Lake labelled the longest skirt length "matronly" and the shortest "whore."

Lake got the idea for the photo from looking at graduated cylinders in her science class, she told The Huffington Post. "[I wanted to] take the idea of impersonal, supposedly objective, measurement of things and put it on something that we do measure, but we don't talk about," she said. "We measure women the same way we measure water in cylinders, but no one says it because it's mean."

Lake also expressed that working on the photo project forced her to reassess her own judgments about other women. "I used to assume that all women who wore Hijabs were being oppressed ... and look down on and judge any woman who didn’t express her sexuality in a way that I found appropriate," she wrote on her Tumblr. "I’d like to think I’m more open now."

One everlasting hallmark of people on the left is their astonishing ability to look at a given societal issue and connect hyperbolic conclusions to it which in fact assume a causality as far removed as possible from the real reasons and mechanisms behind the issue. E.g., in Belgium there's a lot of hyperbole going on among our leftist do-gooders about dramatically rising poverty levels, especially in the big cities. Therefore the government must step in! What they do not acknowledge is that the leftist policies of the same government(s) have in fact ensured a steady influx of hundreds of thousands third worlders, the great majority of them muslims. Then OF COURSE importing on a massive scale households consisting of a father with at best a mediocre labor ethic and minimal skills, a mother who is not allowed by her husband to work outdoors, and a bunch of children, will invariably raise average poverty levels!!!

In this related case Lake does not (yet) offer a solution. Having been schooled myself in logical reasoning, I am actually at a loss at understanding her 'logic' in the above explanation. On the one hand she seems to take offense at other people, supposedly men, who judge women by their clothing (or the lack thereof). Given the fact that in general western males' (dare I say white males? I dare) first reaction to a bit of female flesh is rather elation at a chance to helping yourself to an eyeful rather than scorn and calling names, we must assume that Lake, using terms such as 'slut' and 'whore', must have picked them up from a category of males whose first reaction IS using these terms - muslim males.

Take myself for example, a mean rightwing bastard. Each year I welcome the arrival of summer for it offers numerous occasions to peek in a gazillion of décolletés (of course, Rule No. 1 is Never Be Caught). What kind of a dork would I be if my reaction at a beautiful woman letting the world around her partake in some sensuality would be to call her a slut and a whore? You have, of course, women who do dress up like sluts. They are called 'vulgar'. But generally speaking, that's not how I would describe most of the women wearing halter tops or belle soleils on Blankenberge dyke in August.

So then, one would then assume that Rosea Lake would vector her anger against muslim males in particular, and against the muslim world in general, right?

Her reaction is actually the opposite, and you wonder what cogs in her head must have gotten loose, for as an 'explanation' she offers... 'I used to assume that all women who wore hijabs were being oppressed'.

What kind of a logic is that? She seems to be actually defending the muslim world here - and this while it is crystal clear that it's MUSLIM men who will first resort to name calling when women reveal skin above the ankles!!!

In Belgium, Miss Lake will receive help from a not unexpected corner. First, muslim fashion designer Rachida Aziz, upon hearing that Lake also wanted to sue Van dermeersch, offered her support and right away filed a complaint against the VB Senator at the notorious CGKR, the Centrum voor Gelijkheid van Kansen en Racismebestrijding (litterally Centre for Equal Opportunities and Fighting Racism). The CGKR is a perverse initiative by (leftist) governments past, bulking wiht hardcore leftist zealots. It is headed by Jozef De Witte, a notorious leftist asshat who never in his entire life did a genuine job and who only landed in the CGKR top seat because of his political connections (amongst others a brother who is a provincial governor). In its almost two decaded of existence the CGKR has shown clearly that vis-à-vis rightwing political movements it will show about the same neutrality as Lois Lerner's IRS towards the Tea Party, and neither has it actually proven any practical usefulness whatsoever. If anything, racism has actually increased, though not in the way the CGKR commissars would want you to believe. Anyway, here's a photo of our 'fashion designer', Madam Rachida Aziz:

Don't get fooled by her western dresscode. It's deceptive. It's certainly not what she models for her clientele, since, by her own admission, she 'designs clothing for muslimas who want to keep true to their traditions and faith, but at the same time don't want to stand out in western society.' Rachida Aziz, hailed by our moral betters as a 'progressive' muslima, is basically just as much an islamic supremacist as your average mooslim self-detonator. People like her are simply incapable of reaching the very simple conclusion that at the heart of the muslim world's colossal problems... is islam itself. She's a muslim 'progressive' in the way Mona Eltahawy is, the well-known Egyptian 'feminist' who, for all her supposedly tough talk about the problems the muslim world in general and her native Egypt in particular is facing... ultimately remains an incurable bigot and muslim zealot. See Eltahawy here e.g. trying to spray over one of Pamela Geller's ads put up in the NY subway:

Wait, check out how Miss Eltahawy interprets a concept like Freedom of Expression. Audio and video ladies and gentlemen:

As if this islamic angle was not enough, lookie look at who's gonna be Rosea Lake's lawyer!!! A 'gentleman' by the name of Abderrahim Lahlali. Het Laatste Nieuws quoted Lahlali as: "My client [Rosea Lake - MFBB] is very upset and is heading for Belgium to directly confront Mrs. Van dermeersch".

Who is Abderrahim Lahlali? Oh, you won't get me so far as to pretend he's a 'Belgian' lawer with Moroccan roots, as newspapers like De Standaard are so eager to print. No, like our 'fashion designer' Rachida Aziz he in fact does not care himself a jolt whether he has a Belgian passport, he's first and foremost an islamic supremacist. One of his favorite quotes is 'Justice has no color', but judging by his curriculum Mr Lahlali must be colorblind then, given the kind of cases he has chosen to add to his resume:

a.) The affair Abdelkader Belliraj.

In 2008, Mr Abderrahim Lahlahi tripped over his feet to defend Abdelkader Belliraj. Now, who is Abdelkader Belliraj? On May 30, 2008 I ran the following story on this monsieur:

In early March 2008, Belgian newspapers broke the news that Abdelkader Belliraj (photo), a dangerous terrorist with dual Belgian/Moroccan citizenship, had been arrested in Morocco on February 18 on charges of involvement in an islamist terror circle. The group had links to other islamist and/or terrorist groups such as Moroccan Chabiba Islamiya (Islamic Youth), Moroccan Revolutionary Islamic Movement, the Mujahidine Movement in Morocco, Al Haraka Min Ajli Al Umma (Movement for the Ummah) etc etc. What has this all to do with Belgium? Simple. It appears that Belliraj had been on the payroll of the Belgian State Security for twenty years. In Morocco, Belliraj confessed to six murders he carried out in Belgium between 1986 and 1989. The first was a certain Raoul Schouppe, a grocer who held shop in the neighborhood of Brussels South Station. Belliraj, who frequented this shop, killed Schouppe "because he looked Jewish". Another victim was a 53-year old gay man, Marc Bille, who had apparently tried to proposition Belliraj. The victim's body, with a shot under the ear, was found in Braine-le-Chateau in Walloon Brabant. Then it was the turn of Abdullah al-Ahdal, the rector of the Grand Mosque in the Cinquantenaire Park in Brussels, and his secretary, Tunisian-born Salim el-Beher. They were considered too liberal for Belliraj since they had criticized the fatwa issued by Khomeini over Salman Rushdie, author of 'The Satanic Verses'. They were shot in the head on March 30, 1989. Later that year, on October 3, Belliraj murdered 48-year old Joseph Wybran, the president of the co-ordination committee of Jewish organisations in Belgium (CCOJB) and head of the immunology department at Erasme Hospital in Anderlecht, Brussels. Around the same time, Belliraj killed number 4, said to be the Egyptian chauffeur to the Saudi ambassador in Brussels. Belliraj's motif for the murder: the lukewarm reaction of Saudi Arabia to Khomeinis's Rushdie fatwa. Apparently Belliraj was already an informant of the Belgian State Security while he carried out some of these murders. Following Belliraj's arrest in Morocco, Belgian police interrogated his landlord, Brahim L. Brahim L. rented Belliraj a comfortable house (photo) in Evergem, in the province of East Flanders. The landlord, who is a koranic teacher in Ghent, denies any knowldge about Mr. Bellirajs activities. By contrast, Chakib Benmoussa, Moroccan Interior Minister, said that it was obvious that Belgian authorities "knew about" Abdelkader Belliraj and his activities. He claimed that Belliraj had resided in Afghanistan in 2001, where he would reportedly have met met Ayman al-Zawahiri, the deputy leader of Al Qaeda.

b.) The affair Layla Hachichi:

In 2009, a Belgian-Moroccan girl, Layla Hachichi, was burned alive with boiling water by her own parents while the latter were attempting to 'exorcise the devil' - read, the girl had outed herself as lesbian. Yours truly had a post on the subject on the subject on November 1, 2009:

A Moroccan koranic reader, a certain O.G., has been arrested for the murder of 18-year old Layla Hachichi. Three weeks ago the girl's severely burnt body was found in her parents' house in Antwerps Dam neighborhood. Neighbors say the girl, who was lesbian, was the victim of a ritual murder.

According to O.G.'s lawyer however, NOTHING is wrong:

"Koranic reader O.G. services had been sought by Layla's parents to help her with her psychological problems. He has several times read exerpts from the Koran at the girl's home, but never performed any ritual purification. The man has nothing to hide. Besides, he reported himself at the police precinct."

The name of the lawyer? Abderrahim Lahlali. Koinsidens of course.

And what is the explanation of the parents for the gruesome death of their daughter?

That she had burned herself accidently while showering. In the bathroom an electric waterboiler was found.

c.) The Ghent headscarf affair

In 2007 the Gent Municipal Council voted in favor of a prohibition on public employees wearing visible religious symbols.

(to be continued)

Abderrahim Lahlali. A perfectly integrated muslim according to leftist woolheads. In reality a sinister islamic supremacist, as much a burden to our society - actually, more - as your average grandma-robbing 12-year old mohammed on Molenbeek's streets.

As I mentioned earlier on, the vicious reaction by Louboutin and Lake with the aim of stifling Anke Van dermeersch's campaign, is not a first. In our politically correct world of which the talking heads are forever blathering about the virtues of Diversity, there is very little room for political diversity. Sadly, so long and omnipresent has the barrage of the 'correct' viewpoints been - we are talking about decades here, and the propaganda war has not only relied on the media but to an equal extent on schools and universities - that, alas, a great many leftist dogmas have basically become part of what is called 'accepted wisdom'. Multiculturalism is good. Nazism and Fascism are extreme rightwing political movements. Islam is a religion of peace. Republican presidents are dumb. Abortion is OK. When present at a gay wedding you must look cheerful when cameras are around for gay marriage is a step forward in human evolution. Etcetera etcetera etcetera. Even people who by nature have healthy doses of common sense and/or inquiring and critical minds, feel reluctant and even intimidated when tempted to openly question these 'progressive' viewpoints. In the case of Mrs. Van dermeersch's attempts to challenge the Commandments of the Leftist Bible, the most obvious example of just how far the radical indoctrination of western populations has made inroads in people's thinking was obviously the downright refusal of two well-known Flemish women's magazines to place the VB Senator's ad.

You might wonder, what was that ad about?

Well, given the blunt fact that women under muslim rule are second-rank citizens (at best), to an appalling degree denied the chance to live their own lives and take their own decisions, Mrs. Van dermeersch wrote a couple of years back a book titled 'Hoer noch slavin' ['Neither Whore nor Slave' - MFBB]. The ad consisted of a depiction of the book's cover accompanying a short text decrying the 'societal marginalization' of women under muslim rule, a photo of the Senator, some info on how to order the book, Women Against Islamization's URL, and...

a photo of a girl toddler wearing a tee with the words 'ALS IK GROOT BEN WORD IK WAT IK ZELF WIL'. Loosely translated: 'WHEN I'M BIG I WILL BE WHAT I WANT TO BE'.

Unmistakably nazi-esque huh?

Not.

And yet, this ad was REFUSED by Libelle and Flair, Flander's best-known women's magazines:

'Libelle' - when I was a kid, it was still Libelle Rosita and my mom read it - is your typical women's magazine for the 'mild' womenfolk. The soccer moms, say. Topics covered typically include things like, well, check out the covers below:

'Pay Rise? I dare not even ask it'. '100 women about sex'. 'That's how to make it cozy in home. The Flower Trend'. 'Golly - my décolleté! The 38 most beautiful bras'. 'Autumn Happiness'. 'In 5 steps towards more cuddling'.

Etc etc etc. In short, Libelle is a magazine for hardworking moms with kids. Who like to keep the house tidy and clean. Who prefer perhaps a bit boring, but otherwise safe and comfy sex in a (more or less) traditional heterosexual relationship. Now for Flair:

'Flair' relates to 'Libelle' like Penthouse relates to Playboy, like the Stones relate to the Beatles, or like, uh, Lucy Pinder to Gemma Atkinson. If you don't get the latter comparison, don't worry, I might illustrate my point in some future post (if you're a good boy) (or girl). (whatever). Anyway, the magazine addresses, say, twentysomething and thirtysomething rather 'emancipated' women. There's often articles in it wherein adultery is not only treated as something that is certainly not morally objectionable, but sometimes desirable. I figure these brief descriptions will suffice to situate both magazines.

Well, like I said, both of them refused the above ad. The reason they gave?

Translated: 'Both editors-in-chief refused the ad because they could not reconcile it with the values of their magazines', said Christine Festjens, Director Publishing with Sanoma Media, the publishing company under whose umbrella fall both Libelle and Flair.

Umm... right. I get it. The ad shows a little girl with a T-shirt that says 'ALS IK GROOT BEN WORD IK WAT IK ZELF WIL', and as if that is not bad enough, Anke Van dermeersch says in the same breaththat islam suppresses women. There's no hurling of insults, there's merely stating a fact. Yet according to those two editors-in-chief - both of them women, of course - the photo of the girl and lamenting the fate of women in islamic societies 'are not reconcilable with their values'.

Oh really? Let's take a close look at the position of women in the muslim world.

In 2010, the World Economic Forum released its annual Global Gender Gap Report. The WEF's GGGR is a detailed analysis in which 134 countries are screened yearly to see how much they have progressed in closing the gaps between men and women in four crucial ares: Education, Economic Participation and Opportunity, Health, and Participation in Politics.

What becomes clear is that while there are of course non-islamic countries where women's situations are very poorly, the overwhelming majority of the worst-scoring countries are muslim ones, and most of these are arab states.

Of the 20 countries at the bottom of the gender gap scale, 17 (seventeen) are Islamic – Lebanon (116), Qatar (117), Nigeria (118), Algeria (119), Jordan (120), Oman (122), Iran (123), Syria (124), Egypt (125), Turkey (126), Morocco (127), Benin (128), Saudi Arabia (129), Mali (131), Pakistan (132), Chad (133) and Yemen (134). True, the numbers in between (115, 121 and 130) are taken in by non-muslim countries, Nepal, Ethipia and Cote d'Ivoire respectively, but I figure the trend is clear - though probably not so through the rose-tinted fashionista glasses of snotty 'women's' magazines. Oh, by the way, thirteen countries which have a muslim majority appear higher up in the scale. The 'best' one is Kazakhstan at 41.

If you need more reports, there's a UN outfit, so don't say I'm biased, called the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). It's also issuing a yearly report on the status of women, and regarding e.g. school enrollment, they have some interesting statistics (the numbers are taken from a 2010 report also). The following percentages indicate the difference between school enrollment between boys and girls, and the seven countries with the BIGGEST gaps are all islamic countries: Chad (22 percent), Yemen (20), Pakistan (16), Guinea-Bissau (16), Mali (14), Iraq (13) and Niger (13).

As for literacy differences between (adult) women and men, once again muslim countries 'excel': of the seven countries with the biggest literacy gaps, five are islamic – Yemen (a 36 percent gender gap), Mozambique (30), Guinea-Bissau (29), Niger (28) and Pakistan (27). The two non-islamic ones are the Central African Republic (28) and Ethiopia (27). Taking a bigger sample of 28 countries, the result is barely better: 20 of them are islamic states.

And political participation? The DESA report offers, for the percentages of women represented in parliaments in 2009, the sobering statistic: the only countries with no female representatives are all islamic, and all of them are arab Gulf states – Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Finally, muslim countries are also champions with regards to the percentage of women making up the adult labor force: in 27 countries where women accounted for less than one-third of the total adult labor force, 22 are islamic. In the UAE women comprise 15 percent of the workforce, in Saudi Arabia 16 per cent, and Qatar 16 per cent.

But HUSH!!! These facts plus a toddler in a tee ARE NOT RECONCILABLE WITH THE VALUES OF WESTERN WOMEN'S MAGAZINES.

When this girl is big, she won't be what she wants to be. And if she's adulterous, well, I fear the tips and tricks provided by Flair to soothe the husband won't be of great help.

And so, this whole affair boils down to the sobering, depressing dynamic:

A leading lady of Flanders' only truly conservative movement, the Vlaams Belang, has the guts to call a spade a spade and launches (yet another) campaign to warn against the danger an islamized society constitues for women - and a clear and present danger at that.

A high profile gay man, who should actually welcome the fact that his designer shoes are worn for a change by a beautiful woman with guts AND brains - as opposed to brainless bimbettes, chooses to sue that woman instead. He might have supported the iniative, as a way to show his solidarity with untold MILLIONS of other gay men like himself who suffer daily under the yoke of islamic barbarity. Yet Christian Louboutin the Idiot, Christian Louboutin the Fool, Christian Louboutin the Coward does not.

A feminist student, who should actually give a thumbs up to Vandermeersch for so bravely making a stand against islamic oppression of women, chooses to sue her just as well. She might have supported the initiative, as a way to show her solidarity with untold MILLIONS of women like herself who suffer daily under the yoke of islamic barbarity. Yet Rosea Lake the Idiot, Rosea Lake the Fool, Rosea Lake the Coward does not.

To top it all off, Louboutin and Lake find an eager ally in the person of Abderrahim Lahlali. A dubious lawyer whose clients include an islamic terrorist, Abdelkader Belliraj, who, amongst others, shot a gay man; and the parents of Layla Hachichi, who killed their own daughter with boiling water because she had outed herself as lesbian.